Oral History of Richard L. Bernard (National Security Agency, OH-1988-13, 1988)
Bernard was interviewed at Fort Meade on 31 August 1988, at the end of a career that began as an Air Force radar officer and ended as the fifth director of DEFSMAC. He describes maintaining ABNER, one of the agency's first computers, at Arlington Hall; starting a cooperative education program to recruit engineers who could not be told what the work was; and evacuating the STONEHOUSE deep-space listening site in Ethiopia over three weeks. He had taken a six-month job at NSA while waiting on a CIA clearance and stayed about thirty years. Released in January 2026 under mandatory declassification review, with names and technical details blacked out.
Richard Bernard was interviewed at Fort Meade on 31 August 1988, at the end of a career that began with Air Force radar and finished as director of DEFSMAC, the joint NSA and DIA centre that watches foreign missile and space activity. Oral histories like this are how a secretive agency keeps its own institutional memory, recorded on the understanding that nobody outside will read them.
Somebody asked. A Mandatory Declassification Review was filed on 25 June 2022, and the agency answered on 2 January 2026:
Some portions deleted from the document were found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with E.O. 13526.
So a career told in the first person arrives with sections removed, thirty-eight years after it was recorded. The redactions mark where the NSA still considers a 1988 conversation to be live.
Provenance
- Original source
- https://www.governmentattic.org/61docs/NSAohiRLBernard_OH1988-13.pdf
- Collected
- This copy
- 3.8 MB · 29 pages · archived here
- Rights
- Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
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Accession № 0010. If you hold rights in this and would rather the copy did not exist, say so and it comes down.